Americans do not like to wait – for anything; this includes waiting on hold when they call their healthcare provider. In fact, recent polling indicates that just 27% of people are ok waiting on hold for up to one minute, but not a second longer!
For many healthcare providers, the natural solution to this problem was to enlist a medical answering service, but we quickly learned that not all medical answering services provide the quality customer service you expect for your healthcare organization.
In addition, as the landscape of the healthcare industry continues to change, the best medical answering services continue to evolve in order to offer an expansive range of healthcare call center services designed to improve both patient and physician satisfaction.
Today’s all-inclusive, high-quality medical answering service provides much more value than just answering the phone.
A Medical Answering Service Improve Patient Satisfaction
Many healthcare organizations initially turned to in-house answering services as a way to meet the growing needs of their patients. However, what the industry learned was that demand for patient support quickly dwarfed the ability to manage patient engagement requirements with an in-house solution.
What was initially started as a way to improve patient satisfaction, increase patient engagement, and streamline central scheduling services, resulted in increased patient frustration, scheduling confusion, and even increasing costs associated with scheduling errors, missed appointments, and the need for additional office staff.
As a healthcare provider, you know that the ultimate goal of your organization revolves around three standard goals – providing the best healthcare possible, being responsive and empathetic to the needs of your patients, and operating your medical practice with financial efficiency while minimizing unnecessary resources and lost revenue.
Achieving these three goals begins by meeting the needs of your patients. Constantly improving patient satisfaction through adapting to the changing of patient engagement needs is the secret to success in the healthcare industry – and that cannot happen with a traditional “nine to five” receptionist handling patient calls and other important central scheduling services.
To meet the needs of your patients, your answering service needs to be available and responsive whenever and wherever your patient needs you. This includes live, responsive health center answering services and medical answering services that are available after-hours, nights, early mornings, weekends, and even holidays.
Comprehensive Health Care and Patient Engagement with 24/7 Live Medical Answering Service
Providing a 24-hour live healthcare answering service allows your medical practice the ability to meet the urgent calls of your patients – not when you are available, but when they need you! However, employing a traditional “after-hours” call service is not the same as offering patient engagement with a 24/7 live medical answering service.
Unlike the traditional “after-hours” medical call service, an all-inclusive alternative answering service offers the full-service, virtual central scheduling and patient communication management services that your patients expect from your healthcare organization.
The very best all-inclusive healthcare answering services offer a wide range of patient friendly features, including calls always being answered by a live, experienced medical answering service professional, every call being answered by a real person within 30-seconds or less, and the availability of bilingual and interpreter services for each call that comes into your healthcare practice.
Additionally, the most responsive medical call service most often preferred by patients offer “one call” medical services ; in other words, patient needs are all addressed in one simple call. As an added service, the best medical answering service connects patients, doctors, and providers through one standard contact voice or text phone number that can be accessed from anywhere, at any time of day or night, from initial point of contact to end of service.
The Best Medical Answering Services Improve Employee Efficiency
In addition to improving patient engagement and proving a better overall patient experience, the most responsive healthcare answering service is designed to reduce the workload of your staff while also improving your employees’ efficiency in a number of areas, including:
- Insurance Verification
- Physician Referrals
- Pre-authorization and Pre-registration Services
- Voice, Text, and Email Appointment Reminders
- Patient Outreach and Discharge Services
- Chronic Care Management (CCM)
- Patient Communication Management
All of these solutions are designed to eliminate the opportunity for poor patient experience while freeing up valuable time and resources that allow your administrative staff to be able to focus on caring for all of your patients, all of the time.
Responsive Customer Service Allow Your Organization to Meet Medicare/Government Requirements
There’s been a significant increase in the amount of non-face to face interactions approved as billable by Medicare and private insurers, especially in the last few years. One of the most widely known, and potentially profitable, Medicare programs is Chronic Care Management (CCM) – a program specifically designed to connect Medicare patients with two or more chronic health conditions and providers between traditional office visits.
What’s been most frustrating for many doctors and healthcare providers is the lack of office staff or available administrative time to coordinate, schedule, and bill for the clinical staff time dedicated to CCM. With current CCM reimbursement starting at $48 for a 20 minute session, that is a significant amount of revenue being left on the table.
The new, responsive alternatives to traditional answering services understand, and provide for, the fact that CCM reimbursable services can be provided via telephone, secure messaging, secure Internet or other asynchronous non face-to-face consultation methods, such as e-mail or a provider-based secure electronic patient portal.
The best medical answering services create and manage this additional revenue stream for your organization.
Realize Increased Cost Savings and Improved Revenue BY Using Virtual Medical Answering Services.
An all-inclusive healthcare answering service allows your administrative staff to focus on other important duties while ensuring patient scheduling, insurance verification, appointment reminders, and patient outreach efforts are being addressed.
A dynamic medical answering service also provides new revenue streams for your organization.
These services also increase cost savings and improve financial performance by ensuring staffing efficiency and eliminating wasteful spending on products, services, and staffing that are not essential for the success of your organization.
In the healthcare industry, time is money. Every second not spent on an essential service is revenue that your professionals are not generating towards your bottom line. The cost-savings benefits provided through an all-inclusive medical answering service allow you to ease the demand on your existing staff, reduce call abandonment, and save a significant amount of overhead cost with options like:
24/7 After-Hours Call, Care and Service: Instead of paying for staff to wait for the phone to ring, the one call point of contact services provided by full-service medical answering service allows you to pay one fee for the services for patient services, not the idle time or downtime you’d typically pay for in-house call services waiting for callers.
Lower Costs Associated With Employees: Employee costs are just those dedicated to specific employees. In addition to salary, insurance and benefits, organizations – and especially healthcare providers – spend significant amounts of time and money into training and on-boarding associated with new employees. Outsourcing many of the services provided by a reputable alternative to traditional answering service allows your healthcare organization to improve the services offered to your customers while also realizing increased cost savings and improved revenues.
This new model provides an alternative to traditional answering service provides a win-win solution for your patients and for your healthcare organization.
Are you ready to dramatically improve scheduling and registration workflow, enhance patient and physician satisfaction, maximize client resource utilization and reduce costs?
You have come to the right place.
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